I can’t find the tape of my first interview with Steve Jobs. At some point in the past 28 years—the conversation took place in November 1983—it got lost. But I do have the 43-page transcript, complete with the transcriber’s misunderstandings (“lease the technology” instead of “Lisa technology,” for instance). It was the first of what turned out to be many interviews, currently stacked in a dog-eared tower of pages here on my desk. After Jobs died on October 5, I’ve found myself drawn back to this archive and now realize that it comprises an idiosyncratic portrait of Jobs himself as he evolved over the years.

The topic of that first interview, conducted in a Cupertino restaurant over meatless pizza, was the Macintosh, which Apple was preparing to launch. I was covering it for Rolling Stone. Jobs started our conversation on a combative note, with a spirited attack on the magazine. It turns out he was miffed that he wouldn’t be on the cover. (That honor went to the Police.)

Once that was out of the way, Jobs, trim, almost dashing in a blue sweater and jeans, was a compelling advocate and patient explainer. He was infectiously upbeat about the Macintosh—“Do you like it?” he asked, fully confident that I would share his belief that the machine was “insanely great.” But compared with the cautious celebrity and canny media manipulator he would later become, Jobs in 1983 was a little rough around the edges. He didn’t bother to cloak a tinge of melancholy when confessing that a romance he had really cared about “went up in smoke.” Why? “Because of the stress and the other woman that Macintosh is,” he said. While his work was “the neatest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he said, “I just wish it was possible to do it and fall in love with a wonderful woman at the same time. It appears not to be possible.”

I asked him if he feared the horrible consequences that would ensue if the much-hyped Mac failed, like the flawed Apple III recently had. “Yeah,” he admitted. Not that the prospect intimidated him. “God, if you’re not willing to get out there and do it again, what’s the point?” he asked. “I’m not doing this for the money. I never have. I have more money than I can ever give away in my lifetime. I’m doing it because I love it. If it falls on its face and it’s another failure, I should question my work in this industry. I should write poetry or something, go climb a mountain.”

When I asked him how the Macintosh might fit in his career, he interrupted me even before I got the word out. “I don’t have a career,” he said icily, implying that he was above such meretricious concepts.

Even back then, Jobs described Apple in the terms he would use repeatedly over the years, as “an intersection between science and aesthetics.” When I suggested that he seemed to be striving for an almost Zen-like simplicity in his designs, he agreed, mentioning an early brochure with a single image of an apple against a white background.

“Fruit, an apple,” he said. “That simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. When you start looking at a problem, it seems really simple—because you don’t understand its complexity. And your solutions are way too oversimplified, and they don’t work. Then you get into the problem and you see it’s really complicated. And you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep going and find the key underlying principle of the problem and sort of come full circle with a beautiful, elegant solution that works. And that’s what we wanted to do with Mac.”

At 28, he had already figured out a philosophy that would serve him the rest of his life. A child of the ’60s, Jobs told me about his idealistic vision for Apple: to become a $10 billion company that didn’t lose its soul. Earlier in the day, a group of engineers told me Jobs’ motto: “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the Navy.”

I asked Jobs what he meant by that statement. “A lot of times, people don’t do great things, because they aren’t really expected of them, and nobody demands they try,” he said. “Nobody says, ‘Hey, that’s the culture here, to do great things.’ If you set that up, people will do things that are greater than they ever thought they could. Being a pirate means going beyond what people thought possible—a small band of people doing some great work that will go down in history.”

He was already thinking about his legacy. In fact, he was starting to believe he was getting long in the tooth. “I’m one of the oldest people in the industry now,” he said, noting that he was born even before Bill Gates. “Can you believe that? I’ve been doing it for seven years now.”

At the end of our long meal, he apologized for being tired. “Some days it’s real hard,” he said. “But life’s funny. You never know what’ll happen in the future.”

llustration: David O'Brien

What happened was that the Macintosh, despite rhapsodic reviews and a fanatic cult of adherents, sold below Apple’s expectations, and in 1985 Steve Jobs was gone. During his “wilderness years,” when Jobs started the NeXT computer company and took over Pixar Animation Studios, my contact with him was minimal. By the time he was tapped as Apple’s interim CEO in 1997, I was at Newsweek and found myself interviewing him once again. Days after the announcement, my colleague Katie Hafner and I quizzed him about his return to the company. Over the phone, he insisted to us that he had no intention of becoming Apple’s full-time CEO, that his role was temporary. He was still running Pixar—in fact, he had recently signed a coproduction agreement with Disney. And besides, he had a family now. (It turned out that falling in love while working hard was possible.)

“Life was great,” he said. “I turned 42 on the day we announced the Disney deal, and that was a wonderful birthday present.” Then, he said, he got a call from an Apple board member, asking if he wanted to come back. He said that Apple’s problem wasn’t its people but a lack of leadership. “Even though I’m a swimmer and a runner, what I do is team sports,” he said. “It took a lot of people to build the Mac, to build Apple. I think to these people I’m a symbol of the spirit of the Apple they love.” Jobs said that he believed the company could restore itself, “once its values are in the right place again.”

Sticking to fitness metaphors, he said, “The company needs to spend a lot of time in the gym getting back in shape, and maybe I can play a small role as the trainer.”

It was a huge understatement, of course, which became clear to me the following May, when I met with Jobs as he prepared for the launch of the iMac. We convened in a fourth-floor suite at Apple headquarters, which former CEO Gil Amelio had vacated months earlier. Jobs was wearing sandals and cut-off shorts that barely covered the tops of his thighs. He was in the large corner office where Amelio had worked, tinkering with the slides on his presentation. “I never go in here,” he said. “Do you know that he wanted to install a private men’s room? It would have cost a half million dollars!” We moved to the smaller office Jobs preferred—the size of two cubicles—and he let me lurk while he returned a series of phone calls. First he spoke with a Pixar executive, approving a massive expenditure that would enable higher production values for Toy Story 2. Next he chatted with Jerry Seinfeld about using a clip of the comedian on the Tonight Show in one of Apple’s famous “Think different” commercials. (Seinfeld, Jobs said, was the only television show his family watched.)

Then we retreated to a large boardroom, where a box-shaped object covered by a black cloth rested on a long conference table. Ignoring it for the moment, he explained in more detail his decision to return to Apple. “I decided that the world is a slightly better place with Apple in it,” he said. “I’ve worked really hard since I was 20 years old. I’m now in my forties and am going to do the best I can here. And I’m doing it for me, for some things I have in my heart about the company.”

Jobs shared his blueprint for transforming Apple, drawing a four-cell matrix on the whiteboard. Apple, he said, would pare down its bloated product line to one high-quality entry in each box—consumer and pro models of desktop and laptop machines. Everything else would have to go. (Surprisingly, the hardest decision was to pull the plug on the handheld Newton, which Jobs felt could still have been successful. But he needed the people on that team to work on Apple’s core offerings.)

Now he was ready to show me what was under the sheet. With a dramatic flourish, he ripped it off to reveal the iMac. It was the gesture of a stage performer, yet when I suggested he had become an accomplished showman, Jobs cut me short. “I don’t ever think of myself as a showman,” he said, annoyed. “It sounds like a P. T. Barnum thing. It sounds like you’re trying to sell people snake oil.”

If he had done much personal reflection during his time away, he didn’t share it. When I asked whether he had changed since his first Apple stint, he responded, “I’m the same.” I asked what he had learned in those years away from Apple, and he resisted the question. “I’m not the best judge of that—I’m too close to myself.”

Still, I pressed, money and fame must have had some impact. “We had some early success at Apple and we were worth a lot of money at a very early age. I decided right away that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. And I feel the same way about the public side of things. I don’t trust what I read about other people after I read what people write about me. I try not to pay that much attention to it.”

I reminded him of his earlier statement about wanting Apple to become a $10 billion company without losing its soul. He said that I had lit on the saddest part of the story: Apple was now a textbook example of the kind of soulless company he’d hoped it would never become. It seemed to suggest that growth inevitably brings compromise. “But I’ve never believed that in my whole life—never, ever,” he said.

In 2000, he dropped the “interim” from his CEO title, starting a run of success that would one day make Apple the most valuable company on the planet and Jobs the most heralded business executive of his era. Indeed, his $10 billion dream proved to be too small by an order of magnitude.

Illustration: Martin Ansin

Meanwhile, I was lucky enough to be issued a front-row seat to the greatest show in technology. When Apple had a new product, I would sometimes get an early look. When I didn’t, I would talk to him after the launch. Though Jobs was offended at the term showman, he had become a great one, because his own pleasure in his products shone through. In July 1999, I was summoned back to the same conference room at One Infinite Loop to view the iBook, the first laptop designed with Jobs’ new aesthetic sensibility. Design chief Jony Ive and marketing VP Phil Schiller joined us to watch Jobs preview the keynote he would give a few days later. Jobs began by discussing Apple’s renaissance. Then he unveiled the device, underscoring the striking design—white with blueberry or tangerine accents. (“You don’t have to be dark to be cool,” he said.) With a flourish, he turned on the computer. “So there’s a lot of stuff here,” he said. “You just want to jump on the Internet … Let’s go to Apple here … Here’s Apple’s website.”

At that point I remarked that the computer wasn’t attached to an Ethernet cable. Jobs was delighted.

“Oh, you noticed something? Yessssss!“

Apple, it turned out, was the first major corporation to embrace Wi-Fi, an obscure new wireless technology. Jobs, eager to show it off, went to the QuickTime web page and began watching a trailer for a James Bond movie.

“Pick it up!” he said. “Come, let’s go for a walk!”

He grabbed the iBook himself, holding it like a Spanish waiter balancing a tray of tapas.

“Isn’t this why we got into this business in the first place?” he crowed. “Look at what we’re doing here!”

Jobs was literally dancing, hips swaying in a joyous mambo around the conference table while Schiller and Ive beamed. Yes, he was a showman. But even more than that, he was the ultimate Apple fanboy.

Jobs often steered the conversation away from himself and was always quick to give credit to his team. He could be withering about competitors, usually asking me to put down my pen before delivering his most vicious assessments. But not always. He never shied from criticizing what he saw as Microsoft’s sales-oriented mentality. (“Does Steve Ballmer love PCs?” he ranted to me in 2002. “Does Michael Dell love PCs? These people don’t love what they create. And people here do!”) Jobs also made it clear that Apple, during his years away, had chased short-term profit at the expense of the long-term vision he would have preferred.

And then there were moments that passed by unremarkably at the time but now leap out as rare glimpses of the Apple CEO’s more pensive side.

July 1999: I asked Jobs whether he had seen Pirates of Silicon Valley, a TNT biopic about his relationship with Bill Gates. He had, on the night it first aired. “I figured that I’d walk into Apple the next day and everybody would be staring at me, wanting to know what I thought,” he said. “So that night Larry Ellison came over, and he and his friend and my wife and I watched it. It was brutal, pretty mean-spirited. But as an actor, Noah Wyle definitely had done his homework on me in terms of my mannerisms and my quirks. So I called him the next day, just to tell him I thought he did a nice job. The show was terrible. But such is life.”

January 2004: Jobs gave a limited number of interviews after every Macworld Expo keynote. The last interview of the day was the riskiest—but also potentially the most rewarding. If he was tired, you might get only a few minutes, but if he felt generous you could go well beyond your allotted 15. Typically, he’d be perched on a couch, sipping tea, his new products in front of him. “Isn’t this fantastic?” he’d ask. “No one else is doing stuff like this.”

On this day, Jobs had just introduced the music-editing software GarageBand. But I was eager to discuss something else entirely—the Macintosh’s 20th anniversary, which took place that month. I asked him if he would have guessed, 20 years earlier, what his “insanely great” computer had evolved into. “I would have been completely shocked,” he said. “The Mac ran one app at a time. It was a tool—it could be a shovel, a pick, or a screwdriver. But this thing”—he gestured at a laptop—“is like an environment! It’s like being surrounded at 360 degrees. We didn’t even have email then! We didn’t have … nothing! The Mac is my communications, it’s my email, it’s my music, it’s just everything about me it’s got something to do with. Literally. I hang with my family, I go to meetings at Apple, I drive, I eat, and I’m on my computer. That’s my life!”

October 2003: I always enjoyed Jobs’ introduction of new iPods. Backstage after every presentation, they would be arrayed on a table like a set of engagement rings on a Tiffany counter, and he’d tell you which color he liked the best. This afternoon Jobs was announcing new iPod software. I asked him about the unusual music that greeted the audience. Instead of the typical selections from Bob Dylan or the Grateful Dead, they were ushered in to the strains of Johnny Cash’s stark rendition of the Beatles’ “In My Life.” Jobs acknowledged he included the song as a tribute to Cash, who had recently died, only four months after his wife, June Carter Cash.

“It was one of the last recordings he made,” Jobs said. “When he died I went on the site and looked at all the Johnny Cash stuff. It’s very moving. And you could imagine him singing to his wife.” All these places have their moments / with lovers and friends I still can recall. / Some are dead and some are living. / In my life I’ve loved them all. “In this age of fast music,” he said, “it’s good to slow down and have something like that.”

That was the month that Jobs learned he had pancreatic cancer.

July 2004: Mortality must have been on his mind when I saw him again in Cupertino the next summer for a Newsweek interview. When I pulled out my iPod—I was using it as a recording device—he was horrified to see that it was covered by a plastic case, something that he considered an abomination. He urged me to discard it. “I think the stainless steel looks beautiful when it wears,” he told me. “Probably it’s like us. I mean, I’m going to be 50 next year, so I’m like a scratched-up iPod myself.”

The remark seemed like a good joke at the time, but it takes on poignancy now that I know that when Jobs made it, he was only a few weeks from going into cancer surgery.

In the last couple of years of his life, I didn’t see Jobs as often. His medical leaves meant he wasn’t giving as many interviews. Also my move to Wired meant that I wasn’t writing as frequently. On rare occasions, I would email him to see if he was willing to speak on background on a given subject, just to share his perspective. When he was inclined, he’d respond, and it could result in a long conversation.

During one of my visits to California earlier this year, while Jobs was on his final medical leave, my friend John Markoff reached out to him. Markoff covers science and technology for The New York Times and has been writing about Jobs even longer than I have. He had written Steve to ask if we could drop by—not for a story but just to hang out and talk. Steve agreed, and we met the next day. There were no recorders or notebooks for what turned out to be a warm, unhurried 90-minute conversation.

I left with the impression that Jobs knew what was important to him. He would spend time with his wife and children and do what he could for the company for as long as he could. The effort ended on October 5, 2011. It was nowhere near long enough.

Some years ago, Jobs explained how he picked the icons that appeared in Apple’s “Think different” campaign. “That’s one of the best parts of my job, actually,” he said. “We thought long and hard about how you tell somebody what you stand for, what your values are, and it occurred to us that if you don’t know somebody very well, you can ask them, ‘Who are your heroes?’ You can learn a lot about someone by knowing who their heroes are.”

If Apple ever revives that campaign, I know who I would add to that list.